Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I’ve never heard of this film. How the hell do you miss an entire Ashley Judd/Morgan Freeman movie all the way up to the point where it starts test screening? A Carl Franklin film, no less? Oh, well... at least Invader Zim managed to strap on his human disguise and infiltrate a screening for us. Here’s what he has to say about the flick...
*Note: this movie is in a rough cut status as of now, so things may change when the final cut is shown.
HIGH CRIMES
Dir. by Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress)
Someone in the chatroom asked Moriarty about what he thought about the new Michael Douglas film “Don’t Say a Word”. He talked about how it wasn’t high on his list of things to see, how it was a “yuppie thriller”. At first, I thought it was an odd description, but it makes sense once you read Roger Ebert’s review for the same movie: “ ( a movie) where a happy professional couple suddenly find their lives threatened by depraved outsiders”.
The same description, verbatim, can be used to sum up “High Crimes”, a military court drama starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. Here’s the synopis used by the people from the screening:
“A happily married couple, successful lawyer (Judd) is shocked to learn that her husband (played by Jim Caviezel) has a hidden past as a classified military operative, and is accused of committing a terrible war crime. She finds herself in a top-secret military court where none of the normal rules she knows apply, as she engages in the battle of her life defending her husband, with the help of a private investigator (Freeman)”
The movie more or less follows along the lines of “A Few Good Men”; an innocent US Marine framed by his commanding officers to take the fall for an atrocity, here a massacre of villagers in El Salvador. Judd finds herself leaving her high-profile job at a law firm in San Francisco in order to dedicate her life to the military trial, becoming her husband’s defense, along with an incompetent first time military lawyer and Freeman’s character.
As would be expected in a movie like this, the whole military structure is shown as almost cartoonishly corrupt, with lots of mean looks and lies from the officers who go in and out of the picture. Most of the characters in the film are pretty much stereotypes: the arrogant general, the bully, the military base hooker, etc. Amanda Peet stars as Judd’s mooching, along-for-the-ride sister, in a role that is that distracts from the movie and adds almost nothing to the story, although there are nice titillating shots of her in the movie, which is probably why she was cast.
Except for Freeman, who has the movie’s few good lines of dialogue as well as the acting chops, and Judd, who at least plays a real character, most of the movie plods along predictably with its paint-by-numbers characters and story. The movie is hampered by the usual conventions of the courtroom drama: the vile prosecutors, the nighttime threats of violence from strangers, the Fight Against the System. Little in the movie has any spark of originality: at one point Judd actually tells one character “I just want the truth”, with the other character actually saying “You don’t care about the truth” in his response.
There is a final courtroom scene with the predictable outcome, which feels like the ending. But no, the movie starts up again, giving the story a final “twist” that surprised me a little but will probably come off as predictable to most. Many of these “twists” in movies like these are in retrospect pretty obvious. No need to spoil it here, since Jim Cavizel’s character automatically changes personality so fast the “twist” hardly seems credible.
Also of dire need of help is the scenes in El Salvador. Somehow the scenes ring hollow; the don’t seem to reach the audience in the way other (albeit more ambitious) films like Platoon did. At this stage they seem like an afterthought; the scenes are given to us in quick flashbacks that doesn’t give justice to the full horror of such a war crime.
The movie deals with a botched commando raid for a suspected terrorist in a third world country, so the movie will no doubt be seen as topical when it comes out. This fact won’t solve the movie’s predictable plot and characterization; hopefully by then the print I saw will be vastly improved upon.
E-mail me HERE!!
You’d better e-mail him, folks. He mentioned something about destroying the planet if you don’t...
"Moriarty" out.
